Saturday, 7 November 2015

iPhonitis

Ok, this is a rant of no particular philosophical import, bar that it touches on the vacuity of life and the triviality of human beings.

iPhones. They are everywhere. You cannot walk down the street without beholding some biped fleshsack shuffling along, with their snouts buried in a small screen, eagerly engrossed in the electronic phantasgamoria. Most importantly, these people are not looking where they are going, so in essence you have the added responsibility of not only watching your own step but you also have to be aware that this clod may and often will walk right into you, so engrossed are they in their Facebook updates and 'likes'.

Then you get on public transport. Again, every clown there has their face riveted on the small screen that gives them an illusion of a life.

Worse for me personally I've noticed that every time I sit down in a library someone will inevitably sit down next to me and will start playing with their phone immediately, so even in a fucking library there's no escape. A few days ago some woman had her phone on vibrate and the damned thing was rattling the table violently every five seconds. I gave the bitch such a glare that she put it on silent, but even the fact that I had to resort to such tactics pissed me off.

And then there are the background factors. iPhones need a mineral named coltan to function. This is where it comes from:

I sent this link to a friend of mine who fancies himself as a diehard Leftist and 'Revolutionary', or in other words he's deluded. He responded with an email worthy of any squealing teenage girl: "But I just cannot function without an iPhone". You see, ultimately Capitalism and innovation is the greatest revolutionary force of all: it moulds people to its ends without their even realising it.

I'm glad I don't have one; in fact, only two other people I know don't and I hope we continue to hold out.

And it's also fair to say that the indispensability of the wretched gadget for most people again just underlines the ultimate vacuity of life and the terror of reality. Imagine if people had to do without their toys and contemplate the sky, their lives, their mortality...

33 comments:

People do actually imagine they cannot "function" without a smartphone. What they mean is they cannot be *dysfunctional* zombies without this intrusive and trivially-used toy. They have no sense of history: how have I managed to function all my life without a smartphone ? How could the Victorians have survived, let alone the ancient Greeks ?

They should also realise that ISIS could not function as it does without smartphones (and, presumably, the Dark Web). Though of course the IRA made do with phone-boxes...and lost their childish war.

Many people, myself included, managed to live out both the 1970s and 80s without a land-line telephone in the house they lived in. If we had to use a phone then we used a public call box to say whatever we wanted and paid for it direct with the coins in our pockets. It was functional. The booth limited how intimate one might get in a phone call, the cold in winter made call boxes more like ice boxes, but it was functional enough. It made sure that whatever we said or wanted to avoid saying was best said in person, though letters were an okay substitute.

Even some of the earliest technologies (agriculture, domestication of animals) could be seen as Man's attempts to stave off nihilistic dread and horror by giving himself illusions of mastery over nature. This process will culminate in what transhumanists call the Cybernetic Era: an age characterized by a fusion of Man and iPhone, in which the mind and body will be horribly degraded beyond recognition.

DNA, did you ever see the David Cronenberg film called Videodrome, from way back in 1984 or so? Very both prophetic and creepy, even if he didn't get the details of how the "new flesh" would come about. I'm a radical pessimist, but I hope the Transhumanists wont be able to pull it off.

Love your pessimism Karl. Refreshing. I had a real cynical pessimist as a best friend in my youth and shared accommodation with him. bit of a mistake. They say have one as a friend just dont live with one. My take on the iphones is yes its a sheep mentality and facebook is lame but I guess the youngsters and now even the oldsters are just trying to keep their minds stimulated in a boring ass universe. I dont have an iphone but I do have a smartphone to surf the web when im bored. Looking out the Window of the bus gets boring mighty fast.

I liked Frankie Boyle's description of an iPhone a while back, a "cancerous stick of isolation and apathy" or something. I'm always tripping over smartphone slow-walkers and have noticed how people have stopped reading books on the daily commute in favour of constant social media updates and playing games that would have embarrassed the video games industry in 1985. Candy Crush Saga and all that shite!

I've had a very old model iPhone for a few years which has been good for listening to music, taking calls and getting the occasional email... and following AN groups and blogs when I'm supposed to be at work, but I've decided to downgrade to a pre-smartphone era unit when my contract runs out this next month.

There are other signs of inattentiveness, public dress sense is high up on my list of signs of unawareness. Every time I go into my nearest small town I play 'grey track suit bottom bingo'. With the way that depression/recession and modern capitalism have hit these places there may be not much to dress up for in small towns, even so grey track suit bottoms are as close to wearing pyjamas in public as I have seen.

I have never owned a smartphone and don't even use my regular phone all that often (I dare say weeks can go by without my sending or receiving a single call or text). The reason is fairly simple: I don't care about the minutia of people's lives. And yet, being able to check my school email and have GPS handy to help me navigate would be very helpful to me. I'm due for an upgrade to a smartphone, my phone company tells me, but now it's a much more difficult decision. Are there certain brands and/or manufacturers that don't exploit poor African laborers? Who thinks I should upgrade?

Does anyone know if this phone works in the US? I can't seem to find that information on the website.

I held out on getting a smartphone for the longest because I knew what it would lead to. Unfortunately, my fears have been confirmed. I don't take hourly selfies but I do find myself taking my phone out phone when I get bored. I can avoid doing this but it takes concentrated effort.

And ditto on the GPS. I still remember back when I had print out mapquest directions. :)

Señor Karl,Our sick world still devours the Congo. Leopold, that ruthless and genocidal Belgian king plundered this country for rubber because the world demanded tires for their cars. A forgotten Holocaust. Much later Belgium caused another war for Congo’s copper for electricity and then the never ending wars for tin for the conductors in electronic circuits. And now cell phones and so Congo continues to be plundered to death in the name of progress. When someone like Patrice Lumumba defies this so called world order, well you already know what happened to him. Congo suffers for all its riches in gold,diamonds,silver,uranium,zinc,etc. The same cycle in the life of Homo sapiens: greed, corruption, violence, massacres, and destruction. Raúl

"Imagine if people had to do without their toys and contemplate the sky, their lives, their mortality"

While I like your blog, this reminds me of "race creationism", and I'm seeing this more and more. With the muslim and black population rising so fast that it's sickening, our values will vanish too with us vanishing.

There is a reason there are little to no pessimist black and muslim thinkers, and that has to do with what we would call Völkerpsychologie. Ethniticies do differ; the germans, for example, (on average) love the forest, treat women well (even the Germanic people who invaded Rome did not touch the roman women), have an above average technical aptitude, and a yearning for understanding the "nature of things", just like Faust (and their mean IQ was once 102). If you read german to any level, I recommend the works by Andreas Vonderach.

Thing is, Islam is an optimistic religion (rather a political ideology disuised as religion), and most muslims I know see nothing wrong with being alive, they enjoy it, and the Quran leaves little room for renunciation, compassion, or pessimism (unlike Buddhism and the Upanishads or early Christianity [see Schopenhauer's remakrs on religion: he wrote some of the best that's available on this topic]).

So I'd say antinatalism, or introspection at all, will mostly vanish with white people (and north east asians) vanishing. Sad, but likely. AN would only make sense if all people were alike, which they aren't. There are cultures that don't even need or know of an "ultimate purpose" (see Vonderach), just as there are cultures that don't value introspection or thinking (think african or muslim cultures)

See also Sylvain Gouguenheim's work on the meager impact arabs had on Europe, despite people claiming the opposite (Aristotle at Mont Saint Michel), or Rodney Stark's "God's Battalions" which touches on the topic of how little books and science are valued in islamic cultures.

Richard Millet is also worth checking out, especially his piece on antiracism/political correctness and modern literature, and how it ruined everything culture.

By the way, when it comes to "revolutionaries", I always recommend Donoso Cortes' Essay as well as Edmund Burke's classic on the french revolution. Cortes started out as optimistic liberal and became a pessimistic misanthropic reactionary growing older. Also, Nicholas Gomez Davila is always worth reading, his aphorisms are, together with Cioran's, one of the best productions of the 20th century.

I am waiting for Giordano Mirandolla, Auban, Bazompora, and other mentally-ill self-hating leftists cuckolds to come in any minute now, to explain how it's actually the Western kaffirs who are to blame for everything, and how the Muslims are the true victims and Islam is actually the Religion of Peace.

GM, take your endless whining over to MMS' blog. Show some courage and stop being a slanderous trivial idiot. Have you actually come up with an argument against actual antinatalism yet? I doubt it. Bye bye.

Sorry, I don't understand your Trouble with iphones. Without modern Technology, People would create more children, because the Isolation would be unbearable. Yes, Isis won't work that way it does, but the antinatalism Scene would not work either.

As an iPhone owner, I am happy to be far more Independent and not to listen to the selfish crap in the tram.

A commenter said that human bodies will melt together with the iPhone. OK, what is so terrible about that? It will only disturb humans who fear to die out. There will be more iPhone-humans than humans like me. I don't care.And when These human robots destroy the planet, I don't care also.